The Land of Little Rain eBook

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

By the end of the dry season the water trails of the
Ceriso are worn to a white ribbon in the leaning grass,
spread out faint and fanwise toward the homes of gopher
and ground rat and squirrel. But however faint
to man-sight, they are sufficiently plain to the furred
and feathered folk who travel them. Getting down
to the eye level of rat and squirrel kind, one perceives
what might easily be wide and winding roads to us if
they occurred in thick plantations of trees three
times the height of a man. It needs but a slender
thread of barrenness to make a mouse trail in the
forest of the sod. To the little people the water
trails are as country roads, with scents as signboards.

It seems that man-height is the least fortunate of
all heights from which to study trails. It is
better to go up the front of some tall hill, say the
spur of Black Mountain, looking back and down across
the hollow of the Ceriso. Strange how long the
soil keeps the impression of any continuous treading,
even after grass has overgrown it. Twenty years
since, a brief heyday of mining at Black Mountain made
a stage road across the Ceriso, yet the parallel lines
that are the wheel traces show from the height dark
and well defined. Afoot in the Ceriso one looks
in vain for any sign of it. So all the paths
that wild creatures use going down to the Lone Tree
Spring are mapped out whitely from this level, which
is also the level of the hawks.

There is little water in the Ceriso at the best of
times, and that little brackish and smelling vilely,
but by a lone juniper where the rim of the Ceriso
breaks away to the lower country, there is a perpetual
rill of fresh sweet drink in the midst of lush grass
and watercress. In the dry season there is no
water else for a man’s long journey of a day.
East to the foot of Black Mountain, and north and south
without counting, are the burrows of small rodents,
rat and squirrel kind. Under the sage are the
shallow forms of the jackrabbits, and in the dry banks
of washes, and among the strewn fragments of black
rock, lairs of bobcat, fox, and coyote.

The coyote is your true water-witch, one who snuffs
and paws, snuffs and paws again at the smallest spot
of moisture-scented earth until he has freed the blind
water from the soil. Many water-holes are no more
than this detected by the lean hobo of the hills in
localities where not even an Indian would look for
it. It is the opinion of many wise and busy people
that the hill-folk pass the ten-month interval between
the end and renewal of winter rains, with no drink;
but your true idler, with days and nights to spend
beside the water trails, will not subscribe to it.
The trails begin, as I said, very far back in the Ceriso,
faintly, and converge in one span broad, white, hard-trodden
way in the gully of the spring. And why trails
if there are no travelers in that direction?